It was Joyce Ann Brown’s great misfortune that long before the 1980 robbery and murder that altered her life forever, she had been arrested on an unrelated charge.

It was her greater misfortune to have been working for a furrier at the time the crime occurred.

But as things played out, it was her greatest misfortune of all simply to have been named Joyce Ann Brown.

Ms. Brown, who died on Saturday at 68, was a former Dallas receptionist who in a racially charged case that became a national cause célèbre spent nearly a decade in prison for a crime she did not commit. She later became a prisoners’ rights advocate.

Her death, from a heart attack in a Dallas hospital, was confirmed by James C. McCloskey, the founder of Centurion Ministries, an investigative organization based in Princeton, N.J., that has helped overturn more than 50 wrongful convictions, including Ms. Brown’s.

Convicted by an all-white jury, Ms. Brown, who was black, received a life sentence for her alleged role in the robbery of a Dallas fur shop — a competitor of the one where she worked — in which a man was killed. She served nine years, five months and 24 days before her conviction was set aside.

Her case threw into sharp relief issues of race, class, mistaken identity, prosecutorial misconduct, the unreliability of witness memory and the seduction of circumstantial evidence. It was examined on “60 Minutes” in 1989 and inspired Ms. Brown’s memoir, “Joyce Ann Brown: Justice Denied” (1990), written with Jay Gaines. It also inspired the repentance of at least one juror.

“Part of the significance of Joyce Ann Brown’s case was that she was one of the first dramatic exonerations, not only in Texas but in the country,” Jack V. Strickland, one of her defense lawyers, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

About 1 o’clock on the afternoon of May 6, 1980, two women walked into Fine Furs by Rubin, a shop owned by Rubin and Ala Danziger, Holocaust survivors who had settled in Dallas. One of the women, who wore pink pants, ordered the Danzigers at gunpoint to load furs into plastic trash bags.

Before leaving, she shot Mr. Danziger, who later died. She and her accomplice, clad in a navy blue jogging suit, fled with the furs in a brown Datsun.

Dallas police officers found the car, abandoned, the next day. They learned that it had been rented by a woman named Joyce Ann Brown.

An Unshakable Alibi

The Joyce Ann Brown around whom the ensuing chain of misapprehension tightened was born Joyce Ann Spencer on Feb. 12, 1947, in Wills Point, in northeast Texas, and raised in Dallas. Her mother, Ruby, was a homemaker; her father, Sylvester, was a domestic worker.

Joyce Spencer married a musician named James Brown (not the celebrated one) but was widowed barely two years later, when he was shot and killed in a nightclub brawl.

With only a high school education, and needing to help support an extended family that included a daughter, two stepsons and 14 brothers and sisters, Ms. Brown went to work part time as a call girl. She was arrested at least once on prostitution charges.

As a result, her name and photograph were on file with the Dallas Police Department — a record that would years later set in motion her arrest in the Danziger case.

At the time of the robbery, Ms. Brown, who had long since found conventional employment, was working as a receptionist at Koslow’s Furs in Dallas, about three miles from the Danzigers’ shop. Not long afterward, she opened The Dallas Morning News and read to her astonishment that she was wanted for questioning in connection with a capital murder.

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Ms. Brown left a courtroom in 1990 after learning that prosecutors would not seek a retrial.CreditDavid Leeson/The Dallas Morning News

She resolved to see the police and clear things up.

“Don’t go down there,” her mother later recalled warning her. “You may not come back.”

Ms. Brown was unconcerned, for she had an unshakable alibi: On the day of the robbery, her office time clock showed her punching in at 8:48 a.m. and out at 4:12 p.m. But her mother’s words proved prophetic.

A Number of Errors

At the police station, the first link in the chain of circumstantial evidence against Ms. Brown was her name. That there were probably hundreds of women in the United States named Joyce Ann Brown did not appear to matter, she said afterward — it was she, after all, who was on the books of the Dallas police.

Her job in a fur shop quickly became the second link: To the police it suggested that she had an insider’s knowledge of the business and knew which furs were most valuable.

The third link proved to be her face: Presented with a photo array, Mrs. Danziger identified Ms. Brown as the robber in blue, and she was placed under arrest.

Soon afterward, however, the Dallas police learned that the Joyce Ann Brown who had rented the Datsun lived in Denver. The Denver Joyce Ann Brown told them that she had lent the car to a friend, Rene (sometimes spelled Renee) Taylor.

Ms. Taylor had a history of robbing furriers. At her apartment in Dallas the police found a .22-caliber revolver, furs from the Danzigers’ shop and a pair of pink pants. Ms. Taylor was at large, but the getaway car bore her fingerprints. No incriminating evidence was found in the home of Joyce Ann Brown of Dallas.

Texas officials prosecuted Ms. Brown anyway. Their reasons were never made clear, but they may well have been rooted, Ms. Brown’s supporters say, in their feelings about her social class, her former profession and the color of her skin.

“Criminal cases sometimes acquire a momentum of their own, and sometimes there’s an attitude that we find: ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts. I’ve got my mind made up,’” Mr. Strickland, the lawyer, said. “You always want to hope that it’s either in the bad old days or that it’s a Hollywood plotline. But sometimes it’s not.”

Ms. Brown’s trial began in October 1980. As if in a cosmic reminder of the very ubiquity that had landed her there in the first place, a deputy in the trial court was also named Joyce Ann Brown, D Magazine, a Dallas publication, reported.

The prosecutors’ theory of the crime was that Ms. Brown, whom co-workers described as having worn a black blouse and white skirt that day, had slipped out of her office, changed into the blue jogging suit, driven the three miles to the Danzigers’ shop, committed the robbery, changed back into her office clothes, made the three-mile return trip and gone back to work — all in her 36-minute lunch break.

“Because they had a weak case, they bolstered their case with dishonesty,” Mr. Strickland said. “The dishonesty was that the prosecutor put on as a witness a lady whom his office had previously prosecuted for giving false testimony. And he withheld that disquieting fact from the defense.”

That witness was the fourth, and most damning, link in the chain.

The witness was Martha Jean Bruce, a cellmate while Ms. Brown awaited trial, who testified that Ms. Brown had admitted the crime to her. What the prosecutor, Norman Kinne, did not mention was that less than a year before, in an unrelated case, Ms. Bruce had pleaded guilty to making a false statement to the police.

At the time of Ms. Brown’s trial, Ms. Bruce was in prison for attempted murder. Though she said on cross-examination that she had received no inducement to testify, her sentence was commuted shortly afterward.

By then, Ms. Bruce’s testimony had done its work.

“She did a good job; she knew what she was doing,” Dan Peeler, a juror in the trial, said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “The legal system requires that you follow only the information that’s given to you in the testimony. And of course we had no idea that she was a convicted perjurer.”

After deliberating for “just a few hours,” as Mr. Peeler recalled, the jury found Ms. Brown guilty of aggravated robbery. Had he known about Ms. Bruce’s history, he said afterward, he would have voted to acquit.

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Ms. Brown met with Piper Kerman, the author of "Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison," in Dallas in April.CreditGregory Castillo/The Dallas Morning News

“When I saw Joyce’s face when the verdict was rendered, I was just in shock,” Mr. Peeler said on Tuesday. “She was devastated — and surprised — because she was innocent. And I knew at the time that we had probably made a terrible mistake, but we couldn’t do anything about it. And I could never get her face out of my thoughts for all of those years.”

Ms. Brown was incarcerated at Mountain View, a women’s prison in Gatesville, Tex.

Seeking the Truth

“I had been represented by a white attorney, convicted by a white jury, sentenced by a white judge, and I arrived at prison on a white bus,” Ms. Brown wrote in 1990, in a first-person article in D Magazine. “Now the clothing issued to me was white. It seemed that all the color was being removed from my life.”

In prison, she endured indignities like frisking and strip-searching, along with soul-numbing boredom that she escaped by sleeping 14 hours a day. During her time there, her 16-year-old stepson, Lee Dennis, committed suicide.

“I don’t know if me being in prison had anything to do with that, but I believe — and I have to live with it — that had I been home, I don’t think he would have been dead,” Ms. Brown, speaking from prison, said in the “60 Minutes” broadcast.

A further indignity was that the year after her conviction, Ms. Brown was joined in prison by Ms. Taylor — the woman in pink. Apprehended in 1981, Ms. Taylor pleaded guilty to the robbery and the murder of Mr. Danziger. She never publicly named her accomplice, but she signed an affidavit saying that neither the Dallas nor the Denver Joyce Ann Brown was involved in the crime.

Yet Ms. Brown remained in prison. She earned her associate degree there, and over time, as she later wrote, her bitterness gave way to determination to see her conviction righted.

By 1988, when Mr. McCloskey took up her case, at least two jurors, including Mr. Peeler, were having second thoughts. A few days after the trial, Mr. Peeler timed himself as he drove the route Ms. Brown was alleged to have taken, from one fur shop to another in noonday traffic.

“I wanted to be sure we did the right thing,” he said. After making the drive, he said, “I was sure we did the wrong thing.” He began speaking on Ms. Brown’s behalf in interviews.

Speaking to Ms. Taylor in prison, Mr. McCloskey learned the name of her alleged accomplice. He traveled to Colorado, where the woman was serving a sentence for another armed robbery, and noticed immediately, he said, that she strongly resembled Ms. Brown.

Ms. Bruce’s guilty plea for lying to the police also came to light. On the strength of all this, and buoyed by the “60 Minutes” broadcast and an investigative series on the case in The Dallas Morning News, Ms. Brown’s lawyers petitioned the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to set her conviction aside.

Redressing Mistakes

In November 1989 the court granted Ms. Brown her freedom, and the district attorney later chose not retry her. On the last day of 1993, her record was expunged.

Settling in Dallas, Ms. Brown worked as an aide to a county commissioner. She also founded MASS — Mothers (Fathers) for the Advancement of Social Systems — which aids both wrongfully convicted prisoners and released convicts seeking to re-enter society. She worked with the organization to the end of her life.

Mr. Kinne, the district attorney, died in 2004. Ms. Taylor is serving a life sentence in Texas for the Danziger robbery and murder. Her alleged accomplice has never been charged in that crime.

Mr. Peeler, the juror, who at the time of the trial worked as an animator, later went to divinity school, partly in response, he said, to his feelings about the case. He now works part time as a minister for a Dallas congregation that focuses on social justice issues.

After Ms. Brown’s release, she and Mr. Peeler became friends, appearing together at public events. He has since served on other juries, all in civil court.

“When I’ve been on juries throughout the years since then, I’ve been very deliberate in telling the other jurors what a grave responsibility it is, regardless of the offense,” Mr. Peeler said on Tuesday. “It’s not just something to shrug off because you really don’t want to be there.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Joyce Ann Brown, Shackled by Her Name to Another Woman’s Crime, Dies at 68. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe